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" It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be. "

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" Writing does change you, and of course it feels good to do things, so you could say writing is de facto therapeutic. But really, one writes to write. "

Deborah Eisenberg

Good

Change

Write

" I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience. "

" I would like to never ever think about any political issues. "

" It's much easier to read the stories that have a lot of dialogue; of course, they flow much more easily into speech. "

Deborah Eisenberg

Flow

Speech

" It's almost uncanny to receive a prize named in honor of Bernard Malamud. I must have been in my early teens when 'The Magic Barrel' was published and I first read it. "

" I suppose I'm always looking for a sort of acuity of perception either in my characters or about my characters. "

" I would say the reason that I've never written a novel is because I've never written a novel. "

" I'm not used to interviews. People don't generally interview waitresses. "

" Politics is a matter of human transaction. I consider absolutely everything political, because all fiction involves relationships between people, and relationships between people always include matters of power, of equity, of communication. "

" I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations. "

" To be interested in short stories, you have to be interested in fiction as an art form. "

" We're all walking around trying to deal with a certain amount of shame, to repress it. And we restrict our mental lives to smaller and smaller areas. "

" The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicised so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy. "

" For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve. "

Deborah Eisenberg

Dead

Writing

" I didn't want to write travelogues. "

Deborah Eisenberg

Write

Want

" The first story I wrote was called 'Days,' and I have very little affection for it. "

" Fiction is a report from the interior. "

" I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you. "

" I'm a bit of an expert on anger, having suffered from it all through my youth, when I was both brunt and font. It's certainly the most miserable state to be in but it's also tremendously gratifying, really - rage feels justified. "

" I had no thought of being a writer. I never wanted to do anything. I'm tremendously lazy. "

" The world belongs to no one. There are very few people who fit into the world. And part of the struggle of every human life is to somehow claim a place on the planet, but it's at the forefront of the experience of the wandering race. The wandering people. "

" I'm constantly trying to strip away layers of perceived thought or cliche. "

" I happen to be a 64-year-old woman who lives in Manhattan, so on and so forth, but am I the sum total of my sort of bodily coordinates? Well, of course not. "

" It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily. "

" It's certainly possible to write fiction that isn't trivial and isn't what people would call political, but it is very hard to figure out how, because our ordinary lives have such a strong tincture now of the whole world. "

" I just want to be on my own branch twittering. "

" I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater. "

" I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection. "

" I always need huge amounts of time to do anything. "

" I find I often just fall into a stone-like sleep, right in the middle of the day, just sort of clonk. I can't work for extended periods when I'm beginning something. But if I'm at the end of something, I can work on for hours and hours and hours. "